Your staff started using Claude this year. Each person set it up their own way.

The youth pastor’s drafts come back casual and full of exclamation points. The business manager gets long, formal memos. Your communications director rewrites both so they sound like your church.

Then someone pastes a donor’s name into a thank-you draft, and the draft goes into a shared folder. There was no rule written down about it.

You can write those rules one time for every chat on your team.

WHAT ORGANIZATION INSTRUCTIONS ARE

Organization instructions are custom instructions that Claude follows in every conversation across your organization. A Team owner writes them once. Every chat for every person on your plan starts with those rules in place.

Anthropic suggests using them for communication standards, formatting rules, compliance guidance, and background about your organization.

You get up to 3,000 characters. Only Owners and Primary Owners can set them, and only Owners and above can view or edit them.

HOW TO SET THEM UP

These steps come from Anthropic’s help center.

1. Go to Organization settings, then Organization and access.
2. Find the Organization instructions section.
3. Type your instructions in the text area.
4. Click “Save changes.”
5. Give it up to an hour. Changes can take that long to reach all Claude products.
6. Start a new conversation and check that Claude follows your rules.

To remove the instructions later, clear the text area and click “Save changes.”

HOW THEY WORK WITH PERSONAL SETTINGS

Each person on your staff can still set their own personal instructions. Those apply only to that person’s chats.

When the two clash, the organization instructions win. Say your organization instructions ask for a formal tone and someone’s personal instructions ask for a casual one. Claude favors the formal tone.

Personal instructions still apply to anything your organization instructions don’t cover. So your youth pastor can still ask Claude to keep answers short.

3 THINGS TO PUT IN YOUR INSTRUCTIONS

Start with your church’s voice. Describe how your church sounds in plain words, like a warm, clear voice with short sentences. Add how to spell your church’s name and what you call first-time visitors.

Then your newsletter, event promotion, and volunteer emails start from the same voice, no matter who on staff writes them.

Next, add the format you like. If your board wants decisions at the top of every report, say so. If staff meeting notes should list action items with a name and a due date, say that too.

Then write down the lines your team should never cross. Use plain words, like this: “Never include donor names or giving amounts in any draft. Never include details from pastoral care conversations or prayer requests.”

Here is a short sample to start from:

We are a church staff. Write in a warm, clear voice at about a 6th grade reading level. Use short paragraphs. Call first-time visitors “guests.” Put decisions and action items at the top of meeting notes and reports. Never include donor names, giving amounts, or details from pastoral care conversations in any draft.

GUARDRAILS FOR CHURCHES

Organization instructions guide how Claude answers. They can’t stop a person from pasting private information into a chat.

So pair them with a simple staff policy that says what never goes into Claude, like member care notes and donor records.

Keep the owner role small. Only Owners can change these instructions, so choose one or two people to own them. That could be your executive pastor or your operations lead.

KEEP THEM UP TO DATE

Anthropic’s help center says to keep your instructions short, clear, and specific. Avoid rules that conflict with each other.

The help center also says results can vary in rare cases where an organization rule and a personal rule directly contradict. So test your instructions with real tasks your staff does every week.

Look over the instructions from time to time and remove anything out of date. And know that these instructions can’t turn off Claude’s built-in safety guidelines or content policies.

WHICH PLANS HAVE ORGANIZATION INSTRUCTIONS

Organization instructions are available on Team and Enterprise plans.

Set your standards once, and your whole staff works the same way.

If you want to learn this with other leaders, join The Builder Collective. It’s a community of executive leaders learning how to put AI to work. You can find it at thebuildercollective.ai.